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Skateboard Park in La Falda

01-26-2011, 06:15 PM

Here is a panorama of the Skateboard park in La Falda, Argentina.

I tried going for HDR here but it did not quite work out. I think I should have take a lower exposure during bracketing. In addition, the very top of the sky may seem patchy. That is because I had to use Photoshop to create a small circle of sky.

Did you ever try to correct the best HDRI set of pictures in photoshop by correcting shadows and highlights? Shooting in Raw will give you some more solutions. Shooting bracketing, there are several ways to get info about shutter speed in this situation. Test shoot in highlight shadow areas and use histogram. Or set camera to A-mode and walk around the stops watching shutter speed. Then make your choice. The reference should be the highlight shutter speed. A burned out light area can not be corrected to get details. But you can improve the shadows.

In PTGui I prefer to only use exposure fusion in HDRI tab, which often gives a nice result. And try "automatic exposure and color adjustment". But I do not remember the software you are using.

Comment

Let me tell you a little about my workflow. When I go to take the images I do just like you said. I set the camera in Av Mode and while holding the shutter release button half way I walk around the tripod. I look at the different shutter speeds to see the range. I then go to Manual Mode and set the shutter speed that was in the middle and set the bracketing accordingly. Sometime +/-1, sometimes +/-2 or sometime in between. I guess I should not be setting the middle shutter speed as the reference, but slightly higher or the highest speed that I see when walking around the tripod. I will try that next time.

The software I use is Autopano Giga. It also has color correction options as well, but the HDR option is not enabled because the images I take don't have an Aperture value in the EXIF data. This is because I am using an Opteka 6.5mm (Samyang 8mm) lens that does not provide that information. In addition I have not yet found a quick way to add that data to the images. To great the HDR images, i have been doing the following:
1. I take the images in bracketing mode
2. I import them into Autopano Giga and run the stitching
3. I separate the images into layers based on shutter speed
4. I render all the images (usually 3)
5. I import the differently exposed panos into Photomatix Pro
6. I create the HDR image and tonemap it.
To summerize, I: stitch->render 3 layers->HDR

I once tried the other way around: HDR each individual set->stitch the HDR image->render. But that did not work out at all because some of the overlapping images were too far modified and they could not blend together well.